Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?

Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?
by JonZ MarZ on Mar 28, 2016 at 8:11:45 pm

I've been into color correcting for a little while, but I still find my skills stagnant. I recently had the pleasure to play with the new Adobe Lumetri settings. However, I find it a bit confusing. I'm still not know what workflow to adopt. Usually I try to neutralize the clips as much as I can but my capacity to read vector scope and histogram is limited. I know how to read them, color range/ hue sat/ shadows brights.... but I don't know how I should interpret them to make a well thought move. Like I don't know where I need to look and how to fix the clip. I feel like I am skipping steps or not doing my work well, making me to go back and forth often. I used to go to lightroom and use the eyedropper to balance the pictures tints.

I also noticed that the Basics cc settings is more damaging (lost of details) than the traditional curves and wheel (some colors are going off the histogram while curves keeps them inside). When I use basics settings in Lumetri, I don't know if there's a specific order to fix the image, either if I should go with the exposure first or fix the whites and black, then the lights and such.... This is also a problem with photography.

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by Chris Wright on Mar 28, 2016 at 10:04:05 pm

the basic idea is first match all clips to each other called a "one light" where everything is conformed out of RAW and looks similar.
Then a coloring stage to get the artistic look which can be almost anything. color, contrast, saturation, like magic bullet mojo or Technicolor. Basically the feel you want to convey. Here is a simple 3 step process to initially match all the editing clips to a standard candle in premiere, although it should be pretty similar in any NLE with scopes. Remember to calibrate your monitor so that you get a consistent look.
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-A Quick How-To-Guide for matching all clips to a standard waveform in 3 easy steps in Premiere.

Before you begin, open up vectorscope HLS, vectorscope YUV, and Waveform type luma

-add effect fast color corrector to clip
1. View waveform luma:
using effect fast color corrector:
set black point ire 7.5
set white point ire 90
if black and white points are already maxed out, set output level so they are set.

for grey point(the middle slider), view HLS vectorscope, make as small a dot as possible, increase just until you see other parts increase. a large part of shadow will also automatically match 30% on the waveform luma. You'll find this also creates a consistent slightly Log look so its easier to grade and match later on.

2. White balance(click white balance eye dropper) or... if you can't find a white spot, temporarily set saturation so that it all fits inside HLS vectorscope. Watch the HLS vectorscope so that the large Hue wheel sets the weighted brightest part in the center.

There's a secret trick to get all skin tones to match and thus a faster color match between shots, the "skin tone line".

Temporaily set Saturation 200% to easily see bright saturation line.
Set -Fast color corrector-Hue Angle - line up brighest line in HLS(not YUV) vectorscope between where line red and yellow would be in the YUV vectorscope(around 11:00 o-clock). This is the overall Hue angle for skin tone.

3. Set saturation in fast color correctior to 90% of YUV vectorscope edge from center(100% is touching sides) so all clips have same saturation.
you've now perfectly matched black point, white point, contrast, gamma, saturation, hue in like 10 seconds per clip. And the best part is, they're all easily gradable.

a tip:
don't forget to keep an eye on your histogram for any sharp spikes, this means your footage is probably 8 bit and you could introduce quantization errors into your grade.

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by JonZ MarZ on Mar 29, 2016 at 3:01:48 am

Thank you very much sir, these are great infos. Only, what did you mean to look for sharp spikes and how I solve the issue? it a confusing part because my histograms on my footage are either choppy (black lines everywhere) or normal. Mind you that I mostly use DSLR footage so maybe that could hint you about what kind of material I am working with (most probably are Quicktime movies with AVC with H.264 codecs.) But I often throw in the mix tapes from smartphones and goPro. Either way, I'm not certain if they are RGB or YUV.

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by Chris Wright on Mar 29, 2016 at 5:02:38 am

simple, don't grade until it "breaks" and shows lines
like don't slap on a 8 bit effect-set to max exposure or work without maximum quality on. don't render out 8 bit, don't import rendered 8 bit back in and finish color correcting. don't composite in AE in 8 bit.

spikes can sometimes cause 8 bit visible banding that you can remove with the neatvideo plugin.

10/12/16/32 bit video codecs hold up to grading better. there was a discussion that you need 16 bit log DPX for red.
and I read a whitepaper that technically, the new rec.2020 occasionally requires a 12 bit video codec for super bright gamma!
the math gets intense!

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by Chris Wright on Mar 29, 2016 at 11:53:15 pm

for premiere, use maximum bit depth, for AE, use 16bpc or 32bpc projecting settings. if making an intermediate, render out 10 bit. if outputting a final video for youtube upload, youtube degrades to 8 bit anyway, I recommend DnxHD as it will give the right color, gamma, and video quality. bits are given in millions 8 bit, trillions 16 bit ,float 32 bit. +is an alpha or 4444

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by Chris Wright on Mar 30, 2016 at 1:08:52 am

usually your sequence matches your video dimensions so you don't have black bars. preview is your output view size for viewing. linear colors blends at a 1.0 gamma instead of a curve to blend more naturally. bit depth is how accurately colors are interpreted in increments.

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by Josh Gordon on Mar 29, 2016 at 2:44:07 pm

Not sure exactly what your wanting but I recently have been editing some videos to give a colour spot effect. I basically wanted everything in black and white except the image of a red rose, found the following tips really helpful and clear. https://goo.gl/Wud6VB

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by JonZ MarZ on Mar 30, 2016 at 6:17:17 am

Beside, I think I am going to need more reading materials than quick tips in order to neutralize a clip. The 3 points above you mentions are great start, but I still have many question about those settings like why those IRE settings. Need more tips to adjust white balance, I don't feel I am doing right just by clicking the white part with the eyedropper, it give me so many different results each clicks. And I don't understand point #3.

I've been watching this guy

which give great tips too but I'm still very confused about particular situations where there's generally no tutorial to teach you right. Like what do you do when there's crowds with many skin colors differences, what to do in evening and night etc...

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by Chris Wright on Mar 30, 2016 at 1:11:40 pm

again, for white balance, Watch the HLS vectorscope so that the large Hue wheel sets the weighted brightest part in the center. it is dead accurate. what more could you want?

the skin tone line should work for ALL skin tones. read more about that if you don't believe me.
evening and night will NOT match day because of the "quality" of light. look up day for night for more info.

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by Scott Tiner on Apr 12, 2016 at 5:01:42 pm

JonZ, in addition to watching tutorials it's helpful if you can practice using example files on a tutorial Website like Lynda.com. I just finished doing a tutorial about color correction by Ashley Kennedy. She does a great job. You can sign up for $25 per month and just watch the tutorials (no practice files) or sign up for $35 and have access to the example files. (I have no connection with Lynda.com or LinkedIn.) It would be worth it even if you can only afford to have an account for one month.

Thanks for the link to the tutorial about color correction in Premiere Pro by Channing Lowe ('chinfat' on YouTube). In this video he covers a lot of ground quickly, so for me at this point, it was an ideal refresher because I just finished the very detailed instruction videos on Lynda.com. His LinkedIn profile says he's an instructor at Salt Lake Community College. I can see why -- he's a good teacher.

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by JonZ MarZ on Apr 12, 2016 at 7:15:31 pm

Thanks! this is the kind of learning stuffs I'm after :) Sounds like you learned good from this. The preview looks promising. Does it have exercise implying complex situation (the kind that make the vector scopes going in every directions, or containing many different cultural skinned people for example)?

Regardless, it look to be a great class, and like you said, very well worth it. Looking at it now.

[JonZ MarZ]"The preview looks promising. Does it have exercise implying complex situation (the kind that make the vector scopes going in every directions, or containing many different cultural skinned people for example)?"

The tutorial doesn't contain an exercise like this, but it shows you how to perform a secondary color correction on a clip. I'm new to color work, too, but I'm pretty sure this will solve your problem.

Secondary color correction is where you tell PPro to apply a color effect to a given color range so you can operate separately on areas of the image. Here are two tutorials (one is here on CreativeCow):

Re: Anyone can recommend me a good reading/tutorial about color correction and color grading?by JonZ MarZ on Apr 13, 2016 at 2:26:38 am

Indeed I'm on 2015. There's lack of documentation about the changes from the old vectors scopes and the new one I can't grasp. There was a IRE 7.5 switch on the older one that doesn't show in the new one. So I'm confused if I need to manually set my darker points to approximately 7.5 or just line up near 0.